Tag Archives | Genetically modified organism

It seems to be that science in general has donned a new mask not unlike the worn out mask of religious zealots. Call it dogma. Call it power trip. Call it vested interest in research money, or furthering a career. Call it stagnation. It seems to me, that some pop scientists and their sycophants would like to think they have a monopoly on truth. Either way, Robert Anton Wilson may have pegged it when he said:

The totally convinced and the totally stupid have too much in common for the resemblance to be accidental.

Disinfonauts and others, be prepared. For your favorite “conspiracy theory” may be trodden upon in this article. Remember… No scratching. No hair pulling. No eye gouging. No hitting boobs or below the belt.

We can value scientific inquiry without viewing the natural sciences as free of politics.

Misunderstood scientist of the people or semantic sorcerer bought and Paid For? Recently I posted a video of Tyson’s word on selective breeding. Well here is his follow up that he posted on Facebook. What is your input disinfonauts?

In fact — apart from my “chill out” quip in the video, which clearly deserved further explanation — I didn’t really vote one way or another on GMOs. You want to distinguish how genes are modified? Okay, then label everything, and create two subcategories of GMO. One that indicates laboratory and one that indicates agriculture. I said this explicitly in my Facebook post.

Furthermore, I never said GMOs were safer or more dangerous. I implied that if you think GMO-laboratory is **inherently** more dangerous to human life than GMO-agriculture you are simply wrong. They both can be bad for the environment. They both can be less healthy. They both can disrupt the local flora and fauna.

In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’ I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

There has been a considerable amount of discussion and debate regarding the safety of genetically modified food. Though the topic has been researched over and over again, there isn’t evidence that eating conventional produce will cause disease, despite whatever the scientifically-illiterateFood Babe has to say. In fact, over 2000 studies have found GM food to be perfectly safe.

A new vaccine for influenza has hit the market, and it is the first ever to contain genetically-modified (GM) proteins derived from insect cells. According to reports, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently approved the vaccine, known as Flublok, which contains recombinant DNA technology and an insect virus known as baculovirus that is purported to help facilitate the more rapid production of vaccines.

According to Flublok’s package insert, the vaccine is trivalent, which means it contains GM proteins from three different flu strains. The vaccine’s manufacturer, Protein Sciences Corporation (PSC), explains that Flublok is produced by extracting cells from the fall armyworm, a type of caterpillar, and genetically altering them to produce large amounts of hemagglutinin, a flu virus protein that enables the flu virus itself to enter the body quickly.

So rather than have to produce vaccines the “traditional” way using egg cultures, vaccine manufacturers will now have the ability to rapidly produce large batches of flu virus protein using GMOs, which is sure to increase profits for the vaccine industry.